The queen chuckled at this admission, and Ornon smiled, but grew quickly grave. “His health was broken, Your Majesty. His constitution is not what it was before…”
“Before I cut his hand off.”
“Before you cut his hand off.” Neither of them would mince matters. “The wound is not serious, but he will be in real danger if there is infection, and we cannot afford to have him die. Your Majesty may choose to use other measures and keep this one in reserve. It is your decision, of course.” Costis doubted that this was true. Eddis held a sword at Attolia’s throat, and Costis had heard that there were agreements written into the treaty that gave the ambassador certain authorities superior to the queen’s.
The queen still considered.
Ornon said, “I have seen him jump across atriums four stories above the ground, a distance that would make your blood freeze, and I heard him once confess that he sometimes thinks the distance is beyond him. He always jumps, Your Majesty. The Thieves are not trained in self-preservation. I beg you would take my advice.”
“You could summon them on your own authority.”
“I would never presume.”
He was presuming, and he wasn’t going to give up until she agreed.
He smiled again. “He has accepted certain restraints; that doesn’t mean that they no longer chafe. If they come from another source, he might find them easier to bear.”
“Why?”
“Mostly because he can complain about them.”
The queen nodded, conceding the point.
“Then we are in agreement?”
“Very well.”
Costis and the attendant stepped hastily to the side, and Costis ducked his head as the queen passed. When she was gone, he started for the doorway, and stopped when Ornon reached for his sleeve.
“Your whole goal in life is to make sure the king stays in bed. Has that been made clear, Lieutenant?”
“Yes, sir,” Costis answered, wondering how the task had fallen to him, but too well trained to ask.
Ornon, smiling very slightly, answered the unasked question. “Obviously, His Majesty the king isn’t going to take direction from his attendants and would probably eviscerate them for giving it. He won’t take it from me either, but he might, just might, be more suggestible to your advice. If he does take offense and eviscerates you, well, then not much is lost. Politically speaking,” Ornon added, “of course.”
“Of course, sir,” Costis said politely.
“I suggest you try anything that works to keep him in bed, including bludgeoning him. Her Majesty’s attendants used lethium in his soup, but it was a short-term solution. He was up again in the middle of the night, while Her Majesty and her attendants slept. Do your best, Lieutenant, and don’t worry too much if he threatens to have you executed, because if you fail, it only means that it is your queen who will have your head.” Ornon patted him on the shoulder and stepped aside to allow Costis to pass.
It was apparent, even from across the room, that the king was worse off than he had been the day before. He lay in the bed with his head turned to one side. His face was pale, his normally dark skin yellowed. His eyes, when he opened them to look at Costis, were overly bright.
“What are you doing here?” he asked without lifting his head.
Costis bowed stiffly. “I am here to make sure that you stay in bed, Your Majesty, because if this offends you and you order me summarily executed, it is no loss. Politically speaking.”
The king smiled. “You’ve been talking to Ornon.”
“Yes, Your Majesty,” said Costis, still stiff.
“If I get up, I suppose you will be punished?”
“So I have been told, Your Majesty.”
“You needn’t worry. I don’t feel like dancing just at the moment. You will have a sinecure, a pathetically easy job.” He yawned.
He fell asleep soon thereafter, leaving Costis somewhat relieved and simultaneously depressed as he faced another very boring watch.
The king slept most of the morning. He woke just before noon with a violent start, but if he had had a nightmare, no visions from it lingered. He ate a little soup, after poking at it suspiciously and being reassured by Phresine that it had no lethium in it, and soon went back to sleep. When he woke in the afternoon, he looked better, but Costis’s relief was short-lived. The king was fretful and bored, casting dark looks at Costis out of the corner of his eye. Costis saw summary execution approaching. He could not, as Ornon had suggested, bludgeon the king over the head, and he suspected that nothing short of that would keep the king in bed much longer.
He was rescued by Phresine. She came in to sit with the king, first asking Costis to move the small upholstered chair closer to the bed. She leaned to rest a hand on the king’s forehead. He sighed petulantly.
“If I asked you nicely to go away, would you?”
“No, dear. I have become very fond of the lieutenant and hate to see him saddled with an impossible task. I’ll just stay a moment to be sure you aren’t tiring yourself.”
“By putting lethium in my food. You won’t get away with that twice.”
“I know,” said Phresine. “It’s a pity.”
The king eyed her thoughtfully. “This is ridiculous, you know.”
Phresine folded her hands in her lap and looked pleasant and unhelpful.
He conceded defeat. “Tell me a story, then,” said the king. “Keep me occupied.”
“A story?” Phresine was surprised. “What makes you think I can tell stories?”
“Insight,” said the king. “Go on.”
Phresine protested.
“A story, or I am getting up,” threatened the king, and twitched the bedcovers aside.
Phresine, in her turn, conceded defeat. “Very well,” and she smoothed the bedcovers back in place. “I have just the one in mind.”
“As long as it isn’t instructive.”
“How do you mean, my lord?” Phresine was prim again.
“I mean I’m not appearing in this drama. I don’t want to hear the story about the wayward, self-indulgent boy who learns the error of his ways and grows up to be a model of decorum and never cuts anybody’s head off for spite.”
Phresine smiled. “You wouldn’t do such a thing, my lord.”
“I might. I remember suggesting it to Eddis any number of times.”
“You wouldn’t do such a thing, my lord,” Phresine repeated calmly.
“No, I wouldn’t. I hate killing people. There’s a secret you need to keep to yourself because I will have to kill people whether I want to or not. Yet another reason no sane man would choose to be king.”
Phresine looked very pained at the king’s bitter humor, but only commented with a word. “Awkward.”
“There you have it. Don’t give me an instructive story.”
“Not I,” said Phresine. “Do you know the story of Klimun and Gerosthenes?”
“No.”
“That’s not surprising. It’s a story from Kathodicia in the north, where I was raised. It’s a very remote place.”
“I was there.”
“Really? Not many can say so.”
“I was six. My grandfather took me. I don’t remember anything but towers of rock.”
“Well, Klimun was a king of all Kathodicia in the time before the archaic. He was a great king, a powerful ruler respected by all.”
“Now I know this isn’t about me.”
“Hush,” said Phresine, and began her story.
Klimun didn’t begin as a great king. He was a prince only of his people, a Basileus, in a small valley surrounded by rolling hills. In the Kathodicia, young men as well as young women visit the temple of the moon when they have reached their majority. They leave offerings on the altar there, and depending on the young man, they ask a favor of the goddess or make a demand.
Phresine smiled and gave an example: “O Goddess, I have brought you a silver plate, so you must make all of my ewes bear twins this season.?
??
Klimun was not an Annux, not a king over other princes yet, and as I said, his city was not a powerful one. On the contrary, it was on an evening when there was starvation and sickness and death among his people that Klimun made his way up the sacred path by moonlight to the temple.
His city had been fighting with the surrounding cities for many years. Outside its walls, the fields had been stripped bare by passing armies and the olive groves were nothing but stumps. Fields can be reseeded every year, but there is little point in planting trees that will be cut down before they grow old enough to bear fruit. So, where there is no peace, there are no trees. Inside, the city was filled with slaves taken after Kathodicia’s victories, but so many times had Kathodicia suffered defeats, and so many of her citizens were serving out their lives as slaves in other cities, that Kathodicians were scarce inside their own walls.
All the cities nearby were the same. Their fields produced little, and their orchards nothing. When they ran out of food, they looked for others to steal from. The people in the weakest cities starved. So all the cities sacrificed to their patron gods and goddesses, begging for their favors to make them victorious over their enemies. Everyone expected that when Klimun went to the temple, he would do the same and promise the goddess that every city they defeated they would sack for treasures to fill her temple. He didn’t.
Supplicants usually brought silver to the temple of the moon, or pure white cloth. Sometimes they brought expensive perfumes, but by and large they brought things in silver or white to please the taste of the goddess. Klimun brought a tree. He brought the sapling of an olive and placed it in the open center of the temple where the moon shone down on it.
The goddess, to whom no one had ever given a tree, came down with the moonlight for a closer look. The moon was young that night, and she appeared as a girl nearly Klimun’s age. She had shone on him in the past, and seen what her light had revealed in him.
“Most people bring me more precious gifts, Basileus,” she said.
“O Goddess,” said Klimun, “I have brought you the most precious silver in my city. The silver leaves of the olive. Like all supplicants at your altar, I come begging a favor. Please, Goddess, make me a good leader for my people. Let me bring them peace, and I swear I will cover the hills around the city with silver, in your honor. Everywhere the moon shines around the city it will strike the silver leaves of the olive, I promise.”
She considered the empty hills around the city and the rows of broken stumps. “It would be pretty,” she said aloud, “covered in trees.” She told Klimun, “Very well, cover the hills with olive groves, and I will bring the peace they need to live. But you will have to free the first captive that you see when you leave the temple, and never let the moonlight find you telling a lie. Failing that, your olives will be razed and your city, too.”
Klimun agreed. He waited out the night at her altar, and, in the morning, walked back down the sacred path. The sun was not yet over the horizon, and the road was still dark between the trees. He heard a shout and rushed into the bushes, where he saw a slave—
“I knew I would be in this story somewhere,” Eugenides interjected.
“Oh, no,” said Phresine, “this was a humble slave.”
“Ouch.”
“Though very courageous.”
“Not me,” whispered Eugenides to his pillow.
“Shhh.”
The slave was struggling with some animal. Klimun drew his sword before he realized that one of his own hunting dogs had somehow gotten itself entangled in a snare. It was frightened and enraged, snarling at the slave as the slave worked to free it. While Klimun watched, the cord around the dog’s neck snapped. Klimun was fond of the dog and wished he had seen it first, not the slave. The dog was certainly more valuable, but he remembered his word to the goddess. He struck with his sword and killed the dog as it went for the slave’s throat.
Klimun freed the slave, who was named Gerosthenes, and told him he could go home. But Gerosthenes’s family was long dead, and there was no home for him to go to. He was grateful to Klimun for his life as well as for his freedom, and he said he would stay and serve the prince for the rest of his life.
“And that is different from being a slave in what way?” Eugenides asked.
“I think the difference lies in the choice,” Phresine said gently.
The king looked away.
“One more interruption, and you won’t hear the rest of the story,” she warned him.
“Yes, Phresine.”
“Good.”
As she took a breath to speak, he said, “Have I mentioned that I am king?”
She exhaled in exasperation. “And I am an old woman, and boys with fevers who want to hear a story shouldn’t interrupt, king or not.”
“I’m not a boy,” said Eugenides, sounding like one.
“A boy,” said Phresine, “and your wife just a babe herself to an old woman like me.”
Eugenides grunted in disagreement, but was then, at last, quiet, and Phresine went on.
Perhaps even Klimun didn’t know why Gerosthenes would choose to stay with him, but he was glad of it. He liked Gerosthenes, and the two quickly became friend and friend, not master and servant. Klimun was a very good leader, and he was true to his promise to the goddess. He immediately began the replanting of the olive groves and he invited the princes of neighboring cities to discuss a peace. If he wasn’t wholly truthful, he was truthful by and large, because one cannot tell a lie during the day and be sure that it won’t come home to roost in the evening. The other princes found that he was honest and that he could be relied upon.
As he proved himself to his allies, his reputation for honesty and true dealing grew, and the peace among the cities grew as well. Not all of the cities, of course, but peace held well enough that the olive trees grew higher and higher and the year came nearer when they would begin bearing fruit.
The goddess’s stricture lay very lightly on Klimun. He was honest by nature and, after many years, honest by habit as well. I don’t suppose he had to remind himself very often about his promise to the goddess, and after a time, he began to forget it. I am not saying he started to choose lies over truth; on the contrary, he was honest in his dealing with princes and with paupers. He was kind and he was generous. I am just saying that as the days and years slipped by, he forgot his initial reason for hewing so close to an honest course. Ever since the gods created the world, mortals have been forgetting from where their blessings come.
But the gods make their bargains for a reason, and they do not forget. Not in ten years, not in twenty, not in a lifetime. Every night the moon shone her light on the earth, it bathed Klimun especially bright. She watched him, waiting for him to break his word.
The king, lying on the bed, listening to Phresine, looked uncomfortable, but he didn’t speak.
Now, in the year when the olive trees were near to bearing fruit, there was a new prince in one of the nearby cities, the city of Atos. The Basileus of Atos had died, and it was his only son who had come to power. The old prince had made a few treaties with neighboring cities, but he had never brought his son to the bargaining table, and no one knew if this young man would stir up old troubles the way some young men do.
Klimun decided that he would have a look at this young prince and see for himself if he was a danger. He decided to go to Atos and wander among its people. If they talked about war and vengeance, then Klimun would know what sort of man led them. If they talked of peace and their harvest, Klimun would know they followed the lead of their prince and that he would be a good man. If he saw the prince himself, he would know how the young man treated his citizens. That was the way to learn the most, he thought.
The harvest festival was coming soon. It would be a good time for a stranger to wander through a city without drawing attention. So Klimun, taking only Gerosthenes with him, set out. He arrived in good time for the festival. Once he was there, he told everyone he was a farmer and that hi
s farm was just beyond the border of the land that the city controlled. He was no citizen of the town, he explained, and he was unsure of his welcome, but the townspeople were good to strangers, and they welcomed him to the festival. He drank wine with new friends and asked them what they thought of their prince. “See him for yourself,” he was told at the wine bar. “He will judge the wrestling contest.”
Klimun was no longer a very young man, but he was still young enough to enjoy a wrestling contest, and he decided to enter this one. He won all of his early matches. In the afternoon, he won again, until there was only one match left before he reached the laurels. The new prince judged the final match, and Klimun was able to get a good look at him. He seemed proud, but he judged fairly when he could have cheated and allowed his own citizen to win. Some people might have been angry to see a stranger win the city’s prize, but the prince didn’t seem offended when he awarded the match to Klimun, and the laurels as well. The prince went back to his pavilion, and Klimun, for his labors, received an amphora of wine and an invitation to join the prince for the evening meal.
Now, it dawned on Klimun that it would be hard to sit down with the prince for a meal, and expect the prince not to know him when they eventually met again. The prince might well be angry at being deceived. So Klimun made hasty excuses, found Gerosthenes in the crowd, and the two slipped out of the city as quickly as they could. They had hurried some ways beyond the fields of the city when they came across an old woman on the road. She told them that a horse and rider had recently passed, and in her hurry to get off the road, she’d dropped all the coins she had earned that day selling cakes at the festival. They were there somewhere in the dirt of the road, but the light was failing, and so were her eyes. She begged Klimun and Gerosthenes for their help. Klimun judged they were well away from the city of Atos, and they stopped to help her look for her money.
They were still looking for the coins on the road when they heard horsemen. They stood at the verge and waited for the horsemen to pass, but the riders swept up and pulled their mounts to a stop. The horses’ hooves stamped in the dust, and the horseman in the lead spoke.